Brochures, Email, Inline, and Beer

Woo, I think the glossy "come to TPC" brochures are either going out or have gone. You have no idea how hard those things are to produce. Every talk description has to be edited by marketing folks to make it fit in the space allotted. Ditto bios, track descriptions, and on and on. And the marketing folks are always worried that they've screwed something technical up during the editing and so someone who knows the technology (hi!) has to read it to make sure they don't say that XML is the latest Microsoft standard, or Perl is the name of an Apache scalp (they didn't:-).

Long ping times for Nat

I went away for a long weekend to a bluegrass festival in North Carolina, and was without email access the whole time. I'm still digging myself out of the email that came in while I was gone--forgive me if I haven't responded to you yet!

Inline

Every time I look at the Inline modules I'm amazed at how
obvious and yet how cool the concept is. For those of you living in a cave, Brian Ingerson's system lets you write C, Python, Java, etc. code that is callable as a Perl subroutine. In this respect it's similar to XS, in that it takes care of glue between Perl and your code, but it's different from XS in that it's EASY.

Brian's going to be heavily featured at TPC. He's giving a half-day Inline tutorial, as well as a 45-minute overview of the world of Inline. Even if you don't attend the tutorials, you should definitely look at the Inline modules and admire the brilliant way in which they make a hard thing easy.

Beer

I've got quite a list of people I want to buy a beer for at TPC. It occurs to me that we need some kind of virtual beer tokens, that we can reward our favourite developers with. Like the way that Jarkko dealt with a thorny p5p thread? Give him a virtual beer. Want to thank Alan Burlison for his work on Solaris and Perl? Give him a virtual beer.

If we were serious about it, we could even get sponsors to subsidize a bar tab at TPC. The size of your tab would be directly related to the number of virtual beers you'd received. You could use it for non-alcoholic drinks, of course--Damian Conway's a teetotaller, so we'd have to be giving him virtual un-beers.